This invention relates to a regenerative drive for piezoelectric transducers.
Piezoelectric transducers are often employed in the designs of fluidic drop ejectors and in particular, inkjet printers which use piezoelectric drop on demand (DOD) technology. This type of inkjet printer uses a number of print jets, each having an ink-filled chamber in which a piezoelectric element is disposed. Applying a voltage to the piezoelectric element causes the element to deform. The deformation of the piezoelectric element causes a pulse of pressure within the ink filled chamber, forcing expulsion of a drop of ink from the print jet. Applying different types of voltage waveforms to the piezoelectric element can vary the amount and the pattern of the ink expelled from the print jet.
In conventional inkjet printers, the piezoelectric element is typically driven using a resistive class drive such as a linear amplifier or a rail-to-rail pulser which exhibits power loss in that approximately 10% of the power consumed by the driver is delivered to the piezoelectric element.